


Where the Monsters Are

by ChettaDrabbles (KOranges)



Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: F/M, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 18:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11319537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KOranges/pseuds/ChettaDrabbles
Summary: Tony thought he knew what evil was. He'd encountered so much of it in his life. Monsters too. Even in a world with aliens and gods and superheros...Tony knew not all monsters came from the nightmares he had as a child. Sometimes the monsters were all too human. And all too close to home.





	Where the Monsters Are

**Author's Note:**

> Each of these drabbles are inspired by a prompt I received during an eight month long writing challenge. I'll only be sharing my favorites but every Tuesday & Thursday and I'll post a new one.
> 
> Prompt: "We stop checking for Monsters under our beds when we realize they are inside us."

When I was five, evil was the indefinable concept of fear that I was sure inhabited the dark empty spaces in my bedroom. Under the bed. Behind the wardrobe. In the closet. I always seemed to see something in the spaces between the air vent grill. Eyes that watched me and claws that could slice me from head to toe. I would lie in my bed at night paralyzed and too scared to even cry for help. 

I became an expert at searching them out. Some of the regulars even had names so that I could scream at them one by one to go away. I had a whole routine of finding and scaring away the monsters that hid in the darkness because that was the only way I could sleep. 

One night there had been a thunderstorm casting shadows across the room in hard flashes that created creatures out of the odd shapes of my bedroom furniture. It had been so intensely terrifying that I had no recourse but to pull my blankets over my head as if that could stop the demons from catching me. 

When I was fourteen, evil was the rage that alcohol gave my father. It burned with such intensity that it seemed to consume not just him but everything around him. I would hide in the corners and pray that the flames would somehow miss me. They rarely ever did. I realized then that the danger wasn’t the shadows with it’s cartoonishly large shadow claws but my father with his very real fists and very solid means of hitting me with them. 

There was no bed or blanket I could hide under to protect myself from that demon. There was no barrier between his anger and me. I could spot and predict the shifts in his temper the way a meteorologist could predict weather patterns. Also like a meteorologist, I was often wrong. There would be afternoons where I would came home and there was an unexpected black pitch in his temperament. Trapped by a freak tropical storm to withstand a hurricane armed with nothing but a flimsy umbrella.

That was when I learned that evil was more than a concept. It wasn’t some foreign idea that inhabited only the childhood fears of monsters under the bed. Monsters looked like everyone else and there was no ritual to stop their attack or send them away. Instead it was an emotional one. I learned to smile through broken bones and black eyes. To keep my father, and everyone else, at an arms length because that was the safest distance for them to be. 

And then came the accident. The demon was banished and it took my mother with it. Not that I managed to avoid evil but losing one demon. In the following years there were decades of different demons. Of evil. Evil weapons. Evil people. Evil organizations. I learned to protect myself from all of them. I built myself a literal suit of armor to protect myself from a world that seemed to be constantly attacking both me and itself. 

When I was forty one I learned that I wasn’t the only person worth protecting from the evil. 

Don’t misunderstand me, I had always done what I could to save the civilians. I had wanted to look out for the “little guy” as it were. But I had only ever built myself the suit of armor. I had only ever had one person to look out for and that was all that had really concerned me. But then there was New York. And aliens from another galaxy poured through a hole in the sky and no matter how hard we fought we almost weren't good enough. We almost lost it all. 

Pepper had been in Washington but that was just a fluke. The woman was a non-stop working machine and had only flown there because Stark Industries had needed it. Otherwise she would have been with me. She would have been in the tower when Loki arrived. Just thinking about it caused my chest to ache.

After New York I felt like I was five years old sitting in the dark bedroom all over again. I saw monsters in every darkened corner and threats behind every wall. JARVIS stopped talking to me for a week when I questioned his motives. As if a computer program could never be hacked. The world was at risk and everywhere I looked there were more monsters to fight and more threats to neutralize. I was just one man and I can finally see the demons in every corner, the evil that needed to be defeated. But I wasn't enough to stop them all. I was just me. I didn’t have the blanket to pull over my eyes anymore. I could only see the monsters. I could only see the danger. 

Some of my best work came out of that time. I worked with Banner and developed contingency plans for every scenario. Then we developed contingency plans for those contingency plans. We built hulkbuster armor and a potential method for stopping both the shield and Mjolnir from flying. We developed venom for the Black Widow but also made sure we had the antidote. But no matter how many plans I came up with or tech we put in place, it was never enough. So I did more. I worked harder. I let the desperation drive me.

When I was forty three I learned that evil could be caused by good intentions. That I was more like my father, more controlled by my demons, than I had ever anticipated. 

I had spent so many years treating other people as the enemy. Checking every shadow and crevice for monsters hiding in the darkness. I had never stopped to consider that I was combatting evil by creating a bigger evil. I hadn’t considered that fighting guns with bigger guns only meant that everyone was better equipped to ensure mass casualties. 

I am not asking forgiveness for Ultron. He was idealism gone rogue. My desire to cast out the demons brought, quite literally, to life. The Iron Legion, the weapons, the Avengers all assembled by me to fight evil on this planet and only Ultron was able to identify the biggest threat to peace in our time. Only Ultron saw that the most despicable monster on the face of this planet wasn’t one that hid in the shadows and ran from children. 

It was me.


End file.
